IBM has a large number of ongoing agent activities, which are being integrated into an open, architected toolkit. The architecture is a component-based set of frameworks to allow all these activities to plug-and-play together. The Toolkit allows this emerging agent technology to be easily added to new or existing applications, and the framework modularity allows for choice between components and the addition of new components by anyone in the industry.

The oral presentation and hand-outs at the opening forum will more explicitly answer each of the "first list" questions produced in London. In general, IBM has activity in several agent-interaction projects, but the Toolkit focus is on delivering agent technologies to applications, which are focused initially on single, stand-alone agents.

Given this focus on application enablement, interaction with hardware, software, and humans is a key focus. The "event, condition, action" paradigm is established as a common framework interface across all these interaction types. The emphasis, however, is on hooking events into the rest of the agent system at a semantic level; the device-level event stream is not addressed.

"Agent intelligence" is also a focus of the Toolkit, covering both rule-based automation and adaptive user modeling. KIF (Knowledge Interchange Format) is used as the core representation for inference engines.

Given a base of well instrumented objects (hardware or software, object-oriented or legacy applications), a set of core engine technologies, and an open design to add more such components, IBM intends to move into agent collaboration as well, over time.

Manuel Aparicio IV, IBM Intelligent Agent Center of Competency

Research Triangle Park, North Carolina